


TraNs:Humanism

by bloodwork



Category: NieR: Automata (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:33:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26704528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodwork/pseuds/bloodwork
Summary: 2B wakes up after her death. Trouble is, she's not quite 2B anymore.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 15





	1. 001.

**Author's Note:**

> Tags will be added as the work updates. I know the timeline is confusing, just trust me on it.

_ Everything that lives is designed to end. _

These were the words that repeated within her head over and over. A mockery of the facade that she had been cursed with. A reminder of the inevitability of destiny. Of fate. Beings with souls probably had those things, but for her they were manufactured. Like the missions they were consistently sent on. Like the simulated memories of the older models. Like the reason for her existence at all. A manufactured web of lies that had been better left uncovered.

Androids didn’t have souls. She knew that, when she asked A2 to kill her. She knew there was no beautiful place to escape to, afterwards. But complete emptiness for once sounded like the greatest heaven this world could give her. Silence. For  _ once _ . The god she had wanted to kill was already dead. Space debris floating along in the orbit of the moon.

As her body fell limply to the ground she could see the moon out of the corner of her eye. The last thing her visual sensors allowed her to see before her body shut down for good. A solitary rock, so far away. Farther away from this earth than humans had ever seen. She had lived in the delusion that they had been watching her from on high, from their throne room, like, it had been  _ heaven _ . That had been her heaven. She had lived in the happy ignorance that humanity was sharing these experiences with her. Instead, every single part of her lived experience had been spent living an entirely different life than humanity.

Her eyes couldn’t even fill with tears.

She smiled into the dirt as she heard 9S’s voice calling her, frantic, feral, like a wounded animal caught in the universe’s most cruel and unrelenting trap.

_ Maybe next time, _ she thought as every single part of her shut down, never to wake up again,  _ maybe next time, there will be something to live for.  _ She knew there would be no “next time”.  _ Maybe next time, I’ll have been punished enough. _ Maybe next time, maybe next time, maybe next ti—

**[1t’s t1me t0 wake up.]**

Her eyes fluttered open the way that they do in movies, even though, in real life, it takes far longer than that to swim through the lead and concrete in one’s head to reach consciousness.

**[Run a d1agn0st1cs check.]**

She didn’t have to so much as think the words. The aforementioned check began automatically, reviewing each part of her body, telling her that this and that were functional. She couldn’t have stopped it even if she wanted to; she had no idea how, and anyway, the quiet whirring inside her head was nice. Peaceful. A soft white noise to block out the millions of questions her mind was beginning to come up with. She didn’t want to be aware of the world, or of her body, or her life. Not right now.

She stared up at the sky. The same as always. Robin’s egg blue with the most beautiful puffy white clouds drifting lazily across it. The kind of sky that made you wish you had wings so that you could spend the afternoon up there. There was a breeze, the kind that came from living in a coastal city. Every ten or fifteen seconds it would brush against her cheek, rearrange some of her hair, or her clothing. And there was sound, too, but it was far enough off that if she wanted to go back to sleep, she could. And she didn’t know why, but she was sure that if she  _ was _ to go back to sleep, and to wake up an hour or two later, the people having these conversations she couldn’t quite make out from here would still be there. The stability felt good, like she’d been on shifting sands for so long and had only just now been able to crawl out onto solid ground.

**[D1agn0st1cs check c0mplete. N1nety-n1ne percent 0f all system 0perat10ns rest0red.]**

That was one of the questions swimming in her head, like, who was this? Who was saying this? She knew what an outside voice sounded like, and this wasn’t it. She had had thoughts before, but the voice in her head was too corporeal to be a thought. Also, she’d never think words like this. 

She put it on the back burner and turned her attention elsewhere. Beside her, she could hear soft breathing, so soft that if you weren’t listening for it, you likely wouldn’t even hear it. She turned her head — just her head, because she wasn’t sure yet if turning anything else would hurt — to see a white-haired boy on a cot next to her. His eyes were closed, so if they were found in the same predicament, he must have been as deeply unconscious as she had been for the past . . . well, however long it had been. He had the strangest clothes on, like some sort of . . . she didn’t quite know what. There was this long-sleeved jacket that sort of looked like a military jacket, though the boy beside her looked a good amount younger than someone who could be in the military. And shorts, which seemed an odd choice. Boots, too. She could feel the fabric of her own boots tight against her knees, but his didn’t come nearly as high.

He looked like a teenager, which was odd. What was a teenager doing here in the middle of … wherever they were?

She realized she herself hadn’t been breathing. She’d … forgotten to, somehow? Yet, even as she laid there she realized that there was no need for her to be breathing. When she drew oxygen into her body, it gave her no relief. Instead, it felt like her heartbeat— well, not even her heartbeat, because she would notice if that was missing, and the absence of her heart would have negative consequences. She hadn’t even been aware of her lack of breathing until she really thought about it, and even then, only because she had seen the teenage boy breathing beside her.

What the hell was going on?

The sky above her was blue. Too blue. The kind of blue you didn’t get unless you took away the things that had fucked it up in the first place. And wasn’t that funny, to be suspicious of something because it looked the way it was supposed to?

She wanted to sit up. Wanted to look around and take stock of where she was. But the thought alone was terrifying, and she remained lying there, staring up at the beautiful blue sky, stable and quiet and still.

Thirty-six minutes passed like that. She didn’t know how she knew that. Even as she laid there she could count the seconds as they ticked along, not even like “one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand” but rather in an exact way where if she lost count she knew without a doubt she would be able to pick it right back up one hundred percent accurately.

Like a computer.

Another six minutes went by, and the boy next to her began stirring.

She turned just slightly to see him again, and watched him wake up. It was a laborious process, not in the effort it took, but rather the time — if he was like her, then he’d be hearing that strange voice, too, and it might take him as long as it had taken her to wake up fully. She settled herself in and waited patiently.

Presently, he opened his eyes and looked over at her.

She wasn’t ready for his reaction.

It was a shaky breath and, if he was the same as her, his breathing was only because he was so surprised that he made a conscious decision to do it, to show her how shocked he was at her existence. Though why, she didn’t know. She’d never met him before, obviously. Yet he was sitting across from her - no, now he was jumping up from the cot and throwing his arms around her, and while in her regular life, she might have brought her own arms around him even if just to keep the situation from being awkward, she couldn’t find it in herself to do it now, not when she had no idea what was going on or who he was, not when there wasn’t a single familiar thing around her she could cling to … unlike this boy, who apparently had found  _ her _ the familiar thing of his that he would cling to.

“2B,” he cried from her shoulder, “I can’t believe it’s you. I can’t believe it’s _you_.”

She couldn’t believe it was her, either. She had never heard the name “2B”. It certainly wasn’t hers.

It felt disingenuous to say anything at all, whether it was confirming or denying she was the person he was looking for. She’d land herself in a confusing situation either way, though wasn’t  _ this _ situation confusing, too? If she chose not to do anything she was going to find herself facing the same consequences. But she couldn’t make her mouth open, couldn’t separate her lips to tell the boy hugging her either the brutal truth or a pretty lie. Omission was still a lie, though. Wasn’t it?

“I prayed for this,” said the boy. He was crying. She could hear the tears in his voice.

She felt like complete and utter dirt.

Eventually, he pulled away. He held her at arms’ length and searched her eyes with his blue ones, shining with tears that were still falling. There was a question in them, but he wasn’t sure what the question was, and until he was, he couldn’t ask it. She felt as if he had entered her home, mistaking it for someone else’s, and now he was wandering around the rooms, his fingers trailing along the walls, unsure what was different about this house than the one he had been expecting, but knowing there was something different, something he could point at and say concretely that that hadn’t been there before. The problem was that the person he had called 2B was seeing a completely different house than he was.

Footsteps came from beside the two of them, a ways away but approaching quickly. Staccato clicks - the sound of high heels. The girl on the cot looked around at the ruined landscape full of dirt and uprooted cement and wondered who in their right mind would be wearing heels to traverse it. But as she watched she saw a tall girl with long white hair who seemed to be having no trouble doing so. Furthermore, she was walking like a supermodel - effortlessly immaculate, though her torn clothes and smudged face suggested she herself was otherwise.

Behind her floated a long sword, surrounded by a slowly rotating halo of golden light. If she hadn’t been speechless before, the girl on the cot certainly was now. The sword was unattached to anything else, simply floating there, motionless, except for when it moved just slightly to accommodate the new girl’s movements.

“A2,” said the boy. The girl that was not 2B could hear the neutrality in the word - he wasn’t glad to see her, but he wasn’t upset, either. She could sense that theirs had been some kind of tenuous relationship beforehand, and that it had only recently become something else. Unlike many of the things that her mind and body were doing on autopilot now, this derivation was not from the voice in her brain. It was from her own consciousness, which she could feel as a separate kind of ocean inside her mind, something comforting in its vastness, in its unpredictability.

A2 came to a stop two feet from their cots. She was very tall. The girl on the cot had a feeling that she would be very tall even if she herself stood up. Even if she hadn’t been physically tall, she had a way of carrying herself that would have made her seem so. She was cold, fierce, and analytical. The girl on the cot liked her, though she was none of those things, or at least hadn’t been when she had last been aware of herself before waking up here in this place.

“Something’s wrong with her,” the boy said. If a person could sound relieved and worried at the same time, he was doing it. “She doesn’t look like she usually does, right? She looks like … like she got a complete reset. Memories wiped and all. Drive completely cleared out.”

Drive? Like a hard drive?

Her head hurt.

She had no choice but to look at A2 as the other girl studied her, lifting her chin, yanking her head this way and that. The boy looked on, transfixed, though there was a certain defensiveness to him, too. The girl was thankful for that. This A2 person could almost definitely effortlessly separate her head from her shoulders or send her flying and she wouldn’t be able to stop it. At least someone was looking out for her, even if it wasn’t  _ her _ he was looking out for.

A2 dropped her hand away a moment later and simply said, “That’s not 2B.”

Which was what she had been trying to say, if she had been able to say anything at all, but where did you even start?

The boy had a legion of emotions warring on his face. Shock, because he had clearly not been expecting her to be someone else in a million years. Anger, because what could be in control of the person he was hoping to find, and why were they doing this? And then a soul-crushing despair, the kind that the girl felt so deep in her self that it resonated within her like the tone of a tuning fork, a low resonance that shook her bones and almost brought tears to her eyes. Almost.

“Then who is she?” the boy asked, in a very, very small voice that she had to strain to hear.

This time, she could finally open her mouth, and in a voice she had never heard before that certainly was not and had never been hers, she said, “I’m Ipecac.”

“Ipecac,” A2 repeated. There was a note of pity in it, an  _ Oh no, you poor, wretched thing, that’s not your name, _ but of course it always  _ had _ been her name, so if A2 wanted her to feel bad about it for some reason she had another thing coming. “Okay, so … what’s your model type? Or, what was it before you somehow got transferred into 2B.”

Ipecac was, understandably, at a loss.

“It’s a machine,” A2 said suddenly, quick and dirty. In an instant, she had decided that this being was not worth her time in the slightest. She turned at once, heels clicking against the unpaved ground once again, and began to walk away, head held high, every action streamlined and purposeful.

Bewildered, Ipecac responded, “I’m not a machine. I’m a human.”

A2 froze.

“It’s lying,” she said, but she didn’t seem so sure now. Ipecac could see the way that A2’s fists were clenched by her sides. “Trying to save its own skin.”

“What? I’m not lying. Why would I lie about something like that?”

A2 whipped around, and Ipecac could see the barely-contained rage flickering beneath her face, the anger at the  _ audacity _ . Ipecac was at a loss, like she had been through the rest of this conversation. She’d have said something to save her skin, but she didn’t even know what she would have said, because she didn’t know what was going on, or what A2 and 9S were, or anything that was going on outside of her name being Ipecac and waking up in a very strange place.

Blindingly fast, so fast that Ipecac normally wouldn’t have been able to track it, except that she did, somehow, saccadic masking but taken to an extreme, she ended up with her eyes locked on the blade that A2 now brandished against her neck.

9S made a sound between a gasp and a whimper.

“It’s not her,” A2 reassured him. “It’s a  _ machine _ . How stupid does it think we are?” There was a hatred in her voice and in her face, a poisonous thing that leaked out of her in waves, enough to make Ipecac sick with the saturation of it. A2’s hands would have trembled on the hilt if she had been the sort of person whose hands trembled on things when she was worked up. Instead, she seemed made entirely out of cement, or steel, or something immovable and unshakeable, something that had been forged in the strongest fires there were and barely managed to survive to the other side. It would take more than this to rattle her. “I’ve heard of playing stupid,” she said to Ipecac, “but this is really fucking taking it to the next level. You can drop the act any-fucking-time.”

Ipecac was  _ not _ the type of person to cry. Not at all. She reacted much the same way as A2, with anger and action, with a clenched jaw and clenched fists, ready to punish whatever was making her feel that way.

But this situation was something she could never in her wildest dreams have expected. She was in a strange place with strange people who called her by a strange name, and she was in a strange body, with strange voices in her mind, and there was a strange sword at her strange, unfamiliar throat. There was nothing in this situation that she could hold onto with any sense of clarity except her own name, and even that, she was beginning to wonder if she’d dreamt up.

Before she could stop them, she felt the tears build up in her eyes and spill over, shooting down her face one at a time, and then all at once.

She was a silent crier, but seeing this 2B person cry must have been just as shocking with or without sound, because through the blurry mess of her tears, she could see both A2 and 9S’s eyes go wide, and suddenly 9S was leaping off of his cot and running to her, gathering her into his arms, forcing A2 to back away.

A2 shook her head. “It’s … not her …”

9S’s arms around her were tight, protective, like you’d have to kill him to get to her. This hug wasn’t meant for her, this comfort was meant for 2B, not for her, Ipecac, the human, but she didn’t care. The darkness and pressure formed from his arms around her was more reassuring than she could ever have asked for. She wanted nothing more at the moment than to disappear into oblivion, and this was the best she was going to get.

9S didn’t answer A2. He didn’t say  _ I know it’s not her.  _ Ipecac wondered if he did. Or if he was just holding tightly to a foolish dream.

Was it a foolish dream if it was for the one you loved?

The tears continued to stream down her face and soak into the material of 9S’s jacket. A few of them dripped off to land on the fabric of her dress. She wished they didn’t disappear so easily. It seemed like the second they touched the fabric, they disappeared into it. It would have been nice to see them sitting there, undisturbed, little shining diamonds that were visible proof that she was feeling enough distress to shed them. That something was wrong here and even her unconscious body knew it.

Like A2, Ipecac was also not one to tremble when she got worked up. But her voice shook anyway as she asked her next question.

“Where am I?”

“Earth,” said A2 in a tone that suggested anything more specific shouldn’t be - and probably never had been - expected.

Ipecac swallowed past the lump in her throat. She wondered if it was really there or if it was psychosomatic. A placebo of something that should never be a placebo.

“What year is it?”

The answer could have been given by her internal systems. In fact, she felt them pushing against the edge of her consciousness, trying to give it to her. She ignored them, sent them away. How, she wasn’t sure. Everything in this body seemed to happen just because she wanted it to. No speaking involved, neither vocally nor mentally. Everything except the one thing that mattered.

A2 narrowed her eyes. That look felt right on her face.

“11,945 A.D., using the Gregorian calendar.”

A no-nonsense answer. A2 wasn’t sure what sort of game Ipecac was playing, so she didn’t know the rules and she didn’t know how to outsmart her at it. Of course, Ipecac wasn’t playing a game. But Ipecac was the only one who knew that.

The digits carved themselves into her heart. Once, twice, three times until it was a steady, repeating loop. She wanted to believe that she’d heard wrong, that those double-ones weren’t there at the beginning, that it was only a single one, because yeah, waking up in 1945 A.D. would have been ridiculous and concerning, but far less concerning than 11,945 A.D. If it was the past, then that was okay, things were still familiar, she knew what happened, she could find solace among other people. She might not live to see a year she was comfortable with but she’d make do.

11,945 A.D. was something else, entirely.

It felt like a desert with no people anywhere in sight. It felt like an afternoon where the sun for some reason had gotten stuck in place and it had been afternoon for so, so long, longer than anyone could comprehend. It felt like the ever-crushing weight of despair that you tried to distract yourself from and couldn’t because that horrible, horrible knowledge was always there, an undercurrent, a relentless wave lapping at the shores of your consciousness. It was something she was powerless to change. And you couldn’t just wait until there were other people around. There were never going to be other people around. She knew that in her heart of hearts. She knew it from the reaction A2 and 9S had had when she had told them the truth of her being a human. She knew that there would never be any humans ever again. It didn’t matter why they’d disappeared. She barely even wanted to know, to be honest. It would just make it more real. She’d spend her entire life thinking of ways it could have been avoided. Coming up with hypothetical plans to save a long-dead species. Desperate daydreaming that wouldn’t help anyone, just give her desperate mind something to do with itself, some way to cope with the fact that she was probably the only human left alive.

“I need to … to, like, look. Or something.”

She pushed past the two of them, unconcerned with the fact that they could probably easily kill her before she took another step. She almost hoped they did. Let her wake up from this horrible dream.

But they didn’t. She could hear them quietly follow along behind her. She could tell exactly how far they were trailing behind, down to the centimeter. It should have reassured her, being that incredibly talented. It didn’t. It felt awful. She would have ripped out whatever was inside her that was giving her these abilities if they’d let her. But she knew that this situation was unfamiliar enough, and the body she was in cared for enough, that they would sooner sever her arms than allow her to destroy herself.

She wasn’t sure where she was headed. She had never been here before, and everything looked the same - destroyed buildings, rubble, pieces of walls and so on pushed into positions that kept them out of the way. It had been like this a long time. Far up ahead, only visible because they stretched so high, were two apartment buildings. One slanted against the other harshly, in a way that likely made traversing it impossible.

She wasn’t scared for the people who had used to live there. They had all died long before any of this. The slanted apartment building was just another relic to show how incredibly long it had been.

It only took a minute at most for her to come upon the sight that took all the air from her body, which, of course, didn’t do anything, because she didn’t need oxygen, but the semantics were still there - unlike the middle of the city she was in, which had been gouged from the ground, debris everywhere, a sinkhole so big it would take five minutes to cross from one end to the other, at least in her regular, human body. In her new body she thought it probably might not even take a minute. Still, the scale of the destruction was horrifying. Meandering around the hole, like they had no ability to conceptualize the horror she was staring at, were machines. Clunky, rusty things that looked more like childrens’ toys than the full-sized automatons she knew they were. Spinning and snaking a few meters above the sinkhole were several serpent-like machines that looked like they, at one point, might have been used to drill down into the earth to excavate precious resources, but now aimlessly traveled in a pre-determined loop for, theoretically, the rest of conceivable time.

One of the ugly little bipedal machines approached her from the left. Without thinking, without even picturing the movements she’d make, she reached back, took hold of the hilt of a sword she hadn’t even known was there, and easily executed a number of acrobatic moves and slashes that sent the thing skittering away, only to explode a few meters after that, machine parts scattering to the ground.

She stood there, sword in her hands, legs spread, taking even breaths.

Then she fell to her knees, the sword clattering down beside her, as she raised gloved hands that were not her own to a face that was not her own either, and wept.


	2. ver2.048438

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ipecac meets Emil. 9S is in denial. A2 is nowhere to be seen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the wait - just moved to the big city and have been getting settled in. Updates should come more regularly now.  
> Feedback is much appreciated. Let me know what you liked or what route you hope the story will go down or what theories you have! Let's make this a conversation, not a monologue.

Ipecac wasn’t sure how long she had been sitting on the edge of one of the dilapidated buildings just outside the city ruins. She knew she could check her internal clock. It sat just behind her eyes, gently reminding her of its presence, of the fact that she could pull up the HUD anytime she wanted, but she pushed it away again and again, desperately, wanting some part of herself to remain human.

So instead, she watched the sun. She waited for it to move across the sky even a little bit, to signify that any time at all had passed. But it didn’t move even a centimeter. The horrible thing hovered right in the middle of the sky, refusing to change its position, and Ipecac realized that the Earth, in the time she had been gone, must have become tidally locked to the sun. 

Just one more thing in the list of things that made this place that dared to call itself Earth something entirely foreign to her.

It was eerily quiet, here. She was used to the bustling sound of city life, even from so far away as to consider its quiet roar white noise, but here … here, in this place, the only sound was the occasional clunking of a wayward machine that she didn’t bother going after. She could smell salt on the air, meaning the sea was somewhere nearby, but nothing in her moved her to go to it. In fact, nothing in her moved her to go anywhere. She wanted to curl up and go to sleep for however many years until the world was something she would recognize again.

But that would never happen, would it? She had passed that point already. Nothing would ever be recognizable for her again.

So what was she supposed to do? Go on living inside this body that wasn’t hers? Keep it away from its rightful owner? Well, she thought, it was entirely possible that its previous owner was dead, considering A2 and 9S’s reactions to her. But if they were androids, didn’t that mean they had a backup somewhere? There had to be a server of some kind containing the data for their personalities, or their base functions, at the very least. Unless androids in the future didn’t work like that?

She groaned and rubbed her temples. This was way too complicated to think about.

Luckily, she didn’t have to for long. Some sort of engine sound was bouncing off of the walls of the crumbling buildings, coming closer and closer - at speeds a vehicle really shouldn’t have been able to travel, or at least not one that wasn’t going for the gold in a NASCAR race. Ipecac watched curiously as the vehicle came into view down the street. It was strange - like most things in this terrifying new world - but even stranger than the things she’d already seen.

The vehicle was a truck, that much was obvious. But it was unlike any truck Ipecac was familiar with. In fact, it more looked to be made out of the  _ scraps _ of a truck, piled high with scraps of other things, none of their uses, at least for the truck, obvious. A flag stuck out of the top, with something written in Japanese on it. Ipecac’s body’s programming allowed her to easily read it, but it didn’t answer any questions. Instead, it raised even more.

_ Bargain Day Sale? The hell is that? _

Did they really still have shops in the future? Well, she guessed the economy wouldn’t disappear as long as there was supply and demand, but it was incredibly weird to think of androids using money.  _ Did _ they use money? Who printed it?

She groaned and rubbed her temples again.

“Do do do do dooo-- whoaaa!”

The surprised cry came from the truck. Ipecac shouldn’t have been shocked with all she’d been through, but she was regardless. She realized she hadn’t been able to see it from this angle, but there was an unusual face on the front of the truck. Well, it looked more like some kind of demon or something than a face, but she wasn’t going to entertain the thought that demons might exist here, too. She was already being asked to suspend an incredible amount of disbelief.

The truck had stopped in front of the building that she was sitting on the edge of. She watched as it slowly drove around the mess she’d left behind, investigating from every angle.

Then, to her surprise, it spoke directly to her.

It was a surprise because she hadn’t known that it had known she was there. She hadn’t gone to any lengths to hide herself, but it was still surprising that this newcomer had known she was there without even having to look up at her.

“Did  _ you _ do all this?”

Ipecac weighed the answers to that question. This thing looked to be some sort of machine, though certainly unlike any of the machines she had encountered so far. If she answered “yes”, it might get angry at her for destroying its brethren. However, if she answered “no”, then she was lying, and Ipecac wasn’t the sort of person who lied. Then again, if it came down to becoming a liar or preserving her life …

“I did it,” she responded. Just like that. No additional details.

The truck-machine backed up now, and looked up at her. Or it seemed to, anyway. She had no idea if it could actually see through those ‘markings’ that resembled eyes, though its commentary on the massacre she’d left in the street didn’t leave much room to think otherwise.

“Oh, hey! You’re that nice android lady!” It made an uncertain sound. “But then, you did all of this … but, I guess I knew that was what the androids were here to do, anyway.”

It didn’t sound particularly upset. Ipecac pushed off of the building and landed in the pile of machine corpses without even having to think about righting herself. She wondered if this was how cats felt when they landed on their feet. No thought necessary, knowing your body would adjust itself to land perfectly every time. It was incredibly unnerving, not to be able to make a simple mistake like that.

Was making mistakes what made a person human?

She wanted to rub her temples again.

Down here, on the ground, she could see that the truck-thing was quite a bit bigger than it had looked from up on the rooftop. Taller than her, for sure. She felt a little bit intimidated, even though she knew her enhanced speed would likely keep her safe, as long as she could find somewhere to hide, if it attacked. She’d seen it racing down the road. There was no way she was going to be able to outrun it in a straight shot.

She rested the toe of her high heels on one of the machines. It felt like if she pushed down, the head would cave in.

“Are you angry with me?”

She said it very quietly, but not in a way that suggested she was afraid of the answer.

“Huh? For what?”

“Well … these were probably your friends. Or could have been, anyway.”

The machine was quiet for a moment. The only sound was the very distant plodding of machines along the gravel and the breeze that had picked up, settling Ipecac’s - 2B’s - hair across her forehead. Ipecac had the feeling that if the machine could tilt its head, it would be doing so right now. It was something she could sense even though she wasn’t looking at it right now. But she didn’t know the questions it had, so she couldn’t give it any answers. Not that she really had any herself.

Finally, it said, “Is it crazy of me to say that I don’t think we’ve ever actually met before?”

Ipecac looked up at it sharply. This was the first being since she had arrived here that seemed to grasp even an iota of what was going on. What was this thing … ?

She shook her head.

“I don’t know how androids work, really,” the creature went on, “but I think, even though I’ve seen you before with the other android, uhm, 9S, I think he was called? Anyway, I think this is the first time the two of us are meeting. So, in that case - my name’s Emil! Nice to meet you!”

“You, too,” muttered Ipecac. “I’m …” Saying her human name almost felt blasphemous at this point. Like she had truly moved on from that existence and the person known as ‘Ipecac’ was gone forever. But she couldn’t start thinking like that, or Ipecac really would be gone forever. “My name … it’s Ipecac.”

“I knew it! I was right!” Emil did what Ipecac assumed was a little victory lap, which was over almost before she had even noticed it had happened. “So then - where’s 9S? And, while we’re at it - where’s 2B?”

She didn’t want to answer these questions. Answering them just cemented the fact that this wasn’t her life, that she had apparently taken it away from someone who deserved it, and that there was probably no going back. But it wasn’t Emil’s fault. He (was he a he?) had been nothing but pleasant towards her, even when she had killed scores of his maybe-brethren in less than five minutes, just because they had been in her way and she had needed to get out her feelings one way or the other.

She shook her head. “I didn’t want 9S and A2 to come after me. So they didn’t.” Although she wouldn’t put it past them to have snuck after her, watching from the shadows. But she was pretty confident in her new senses that she would have picked up their presences if they were anywhere close. “As for 2B … I don’t know.”

She gave Emil the shortest version of the story, which was also the only version of the story, because there was no making something like “I woke up in this body and have no idea why” any longer.

For a very long time, Emil was quiet, and so was Ipecac.

Then, Emil said, “So you’re … human?”

“Mhm.”

Ipecac got the feeling that if Emil could be looking off into the distance thoughtfully, he would be. As it was, she had to settle for staring at the uncomfortably stoic machine face above her.

“You know - I used to be human, too.”

This statement could not have surprised Ipecac more if Emil had said it while sprouting wings and flying away. Actually, with his machine body, that was probably infinitely more likely than him telling her that.

“You - you - … what?!”

“Yup! I didn’t remember until recently, when 2B and 9S helped me regain my memories, but … a long, long time ago, before I had to turn myself into this, I was human. Or, well, the original Emil was, anyway …”

He told her his story, about his unusual power, about his sister, and about becoming a weapon in her place. It was a welcome relief from all the things that Ipecac had been experiencing so far. She couldn’t imagine a life like Emil’s. And he’d been here all this time … 

“Emil? How old are you?”

“Hm? Oh … they asked me that, too, back then. But the truth is, I don’t know the answer to that. I’m not the original Emil. And it’s been so long since any of that happened, anyway … so, really, it could be any amount of time. I try not to pay attention to it too much, because it hurts. Thinking about it really hurts …”

Ipecac took her foot off of the machine lifeform’s head. “Yeah. I know what you mean. Hey, Emil?”

“Yeah?”

She had been about to suggest that the two of them go somewhere, by themselves. Two beings who needed the companionship of one another because they were the only two beings that were in similar situations to each other. Two humans in the midst of a world populated with nothing but automated machinery - whether it be machine lifeforms, androids, or whatever else humanity had invented in the thousands of years since she’d been alive. She had just opened her mouth to say the words when she heard the quiet footfalls of 9S behind her.

She turned around sharply. 9S looked embarrassed to have been caught, even though he hadn’t been sneaking up on her.

“Maybe I should leave you two alone,” said Emil. His voice had already given away the fact that he was most likely a child, but the uncertainty in it made it obvious that he wasn’t really sure  _ what _ two people like Ipecac and 9S did when they were alone. If he really was human like he said, maybe all he thought happened was that somehow a boy and a girl just became husband and wife and lived happily ever after. Though Ipecac had more faith in Emil than his thinking that she had any feelings for 9S.

“I’m around here all the time,” he continued, answering her unspoken question. “You know, with my shop and all … anyway, just let me know how everything goes, okay, Ipecac? We’ll talk soon!”

And just like that, he was gone. So fast she hadn’t even realized he had disappeared until she was looking at the spot he had used to be in and he was no longer there.

She turned to face 9S, who still looked somewhat sheepish, even though she couldn’t see his eyes through the blindfold he was wearing.

“What is it?” she asked. No-nonsense - no room to do anything but answer the question she had tasked him with.

9S rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “I … I was hoping we could go somewhere and talk. Just the two of us.”

Well, she thought, she’d been prepared to do that anyway. Just not with 9S. With a sigh, she took her foot off the machine head and gestured outwards in a wide sweep. “Lead the way.”

* * *

Ipecac watched the stone she had skipped make it a good fifty or sixty feet before sinking with a satisfying, yet disappointing, plop into the ocean.

Not flat enough, she thought. She had the strength now, to throw stones much farther than she had as a human, but it seemed that you still had to account for stone size and shape. She bit her lip and crouched down low to the ground again, searching for a stone that would beat her personal record which, right now, was held by the stone she had just skipped. She wondered if she could get one hundreds of feet out, towards that strange architecture in the distance, something that didn’t look enough like a robot to be a robot, but also didn’t look enough like a building to be a building.

Behind her, she could hear 9S shifting from foot to foot. Trying to figure out how to breach whatever topic of conversation he wanted to breach with her. She wasn’t going to encourage him. If he wanted to talk, he’d talk. If he didn’t, then he wouldn’t. It wasn’t her job to make him talk if he wasn’t feeling comfortable with it.

She found a good stone and weighed it in her hand. Everything felt so much lighter now that she had this strength, but she could still feel the difference between this one and the one she had just skipped. She let the computers in her head decide an optimal path for stone skipping, and then she let it fly, watching with pride as it headed out towards the robot-building-architecture thing, sinking a little bit past halfway there.

“Getting there,” she said to no one in particular.

9S finally asked, “What are you doing?”

He said it curiously. He seemed like a curious boy, from the little experience she had with him. The sort that might have asked questions about everything when he was a child and just never grown out of it. If he had been a child, anyway, which she highly doubted. Androids didn’t have childhoods. Maybe they were all innately curious, every second of every day, because of their lack of knowledge about the human world. Or maybe they were made knowing everything about it, factually, but didn’t know things that sided more on sentimentality and emotion.

She could have asked him, but she didn’t.

“Skipping stones,” she said.

9S came up beside her and watched as she selected another smooth rock and took in the view of the ocean, stretching out for so many miles it felt like it would never end. He watched as she calculated the distance, and he watched - startling a bit, despite having seen her do this before - when she threw the rock, her wrist and hand moving in one fluid motion that sent the rock skipping - skipping - skipping - until it finally sank, almost having made it to the thing standing there in the ocean.

“And you’re doing that because …”

Unlike most people, 9S didn’t sound judgmental or rude when he asked. Just interested.

“Because it’s something I want to do, and it’s taking my mind off of all this, so …” She leaned down and scanned the ground for another rock. She found one that wasn’t smooth at all - a jagged, ugly piece of cement that must have come off of the destroyed road under her feet and running off into the distance towards a structure that must have held missiles or something at some point. Machines hovered around the broken road, but none of them made a move to attack either Ipecac or 9S, so Ipecac didn’t make a move to attack them either, her previous instance with the pile of machines she’d left in scraps notwithstanding. She could sort of breathe now. And besides, violence had never really been in her nature.

9S watched her fling the road piece into the ocean. It didn’t skip even once, of course, and with a deep  _ plop _ it sank right to the bottom. Somehow, that was even more satisfying than the ones that had skipped.

“If you want to ask me something,” said Ipecac, not turning to look at him, just continuing to look out over the ocean, as if something would happen, or as if she hoped something would happen, or as if she assumed something would happen, because that’s what things did in this reality, they  _ happened _ , and they confused her, and this was not at all what anyone would have meant by wanting a more exciting life, even if she had wished for that, which she so profusely had not, “then you should ask me something.”

“It’s just, I don’t want to seem too forward …” But the way he was speaking, his tone of voice, sounded like he wanted to be nothing  _ but _ forward. Whoever this 2B person was, she must have been a real bitch. Well, maybe not a bitch … Ipecac could see how people might get frustrated by 9S’s …  _ interesting _ personality. She much preferred the little she had seen of A2’s instead.

“Go ahead.”

Despite not looking at him, she could tell that 9S was standing uncomfortably, trying to figure out how to best approach this person he had so little experience with. “I … it’s just … I think I should run a diagnostic on you,” he said. The first words came out slowly, unsure, and then the rest all at once, like if he didn’t speak them as quickly as he could, Ipecac would cut him off.

She did the opposite, actually. She didn’t answer for a long few seconds, and then she turned around, looking at him, at the way he was fidgeting with his own hands. His blindfold covered his eyes - weird that he had a blindfold, how the hell could he see through that? - but she could tell that if it hadn’t been, she would be able to see the way he was avoiding looking directly at her, flicking his eyes instead to the side, not wanting to see her reaction to his blurted suggestion.

“I ran a diagnostic already,” she said. She was pretty sure that was what the robot voice inside her had been when she first woke up. No problems found, or at least nothing of the scale she was sure 9S would have been looking for.

“Yeah, but … 2B, don’t take this the wrong way, but something’s  _ seriously _ wrong. I mean, I thought maybe it was just some kind of jumbled personality matrix, and that your system would resolve it in time, but … it’s been a while now, and you’re still acting like-”

He stopped abruptly when he saw Ipecac gritting her teeth.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” she said in a way that didn’t allow for argument.

Except of course 9S argued.

“Listen - 2B, I just want you to feel like your old self again - and it’s not just that, it’s that I-!”

He likely wouldn’t have finished the sentence anyway, but he didn’t get the chance to, because Ipecac drew Virtuous Contract - she knew now that that was what the blade she favored was called - and pointed it at him, her fist clenching hard enough around the handle that she heard the constricting of her gloves, and her resolve so powerful that the blade shook just the slightest bit. Androids were computers - she wondered if her rage was so human that it overtook the computer inside her and kept her from holding the blade steady no matter how angry the original owner of this body would have become.

“I don’t know where she went,” she hissed through clenched teeth, her voice taking on the calm that her grip should have had, “but 2B is gone. I’m sorry about whatever happened. But I am  _ not _ 2B. You will  _ not _ call me 2B, and you will  _ not _ insinuate that I am anyone but the person that I already told you I am. Do you understand, 9S?”

“But 2B-!”

She wanted so badly to at least smack him with the flat of the blade, leave him unconscious. She really wasn’t a violent person, but having her identity consistently disrespected like this - at first accidentally, but now willingly, and consciously - was cutting deep to her core.

However, she could see the distress in 9S’s body language. The way he almost reached out for her, but reeled himself back in just in time. The way that he wanted so badly to run to her and draw her into his arms, hold her tight until she relented and admitted that she was, in fact, his beloved 2B, and that she was so sorry that she had worried him, and that she would be by his side forevermore. She could see that so clearly, and something about it quelled that fiery desire within her, or at least dimmed it considerably, to the point that she released Virtuous Contract, letting it take its place hovering inches off her back again.

And then she turned, and she ran faster than 9S could ever hope to match.


End file.
